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Comment by leemhoffman | Hacker News Reader

If your gmail is slow there is a simple and effective solution. I've had gmail for years and actually pay for my google apps account. Like the author I assumed my growing mailbox size and filters were the reason for the increasing slowness. So I contacted support and after some investigation they noticed that I had tons of polling requests that were slowing down my account from connected apps (think greplin). They suggested I remove them. I was skeptical, but I did. Immediately gmail was BLAZING fast again. If your gmail or google apps is slow I highly recommend removing all connected apps ASAP:

https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens

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I was coming to this page just to post a comment like yours above. Thanks for doing that.

I work on the Gmail backend team and we regularly see blogs go by such as this one. The vast majority of the times that prominent bloggers report slowness it's because they do have tons of apps polling their account via IMAP or other sync methods. All of these apps end up competing for resources to your account with the web UI and thus you experience slowness.

Internally we have accounts with upwards of 100G of mail still being very usable, so we know Gmail scales. Also we have quite a few people internally focusing specifically on finding and fixing these types of problems so that eventually it won't matter how many clients you have or how large your mailbox is, but these things take time. Gmail is a huge ship, we can't turn on a dime.

So yeah, check that IssuedAuthSubTokens page and revoke access to any random services that you've tried out and forgot about.

Hope that helps. -Andrew

Sorry, but this isn't the case for me. IssuedAuthSubTokens shows a google talk authorization (bitlbee...), google calendar, and chrome.

But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely unusable.

I'm sorry that trick isn't working for you. As you mention LKML causes slowdown, it's possible that you're getting an inordinate amount of mail. It's also possible you've got an agressive IMAP client that isn't using one of those auth tokens (another common slowdown cause).

As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues.

Hope that helps,

-Andrew

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100

The response is much appreciated!

Suggestion:

Why not give the UI interface priority over other polls (allocate more bandwidth to it) for 5-10 minute chunks when its active?

There are people working on those sorts of improvements, but it's not that straightforward so it takes time to get it right.

The reason that it's not that straightforward is that lots of operations change state in your account, so you need proper ordering of requests for everything that comes in if you want to ensure consistency. Furthermore when you do a UI operation you want it to happen now, and anything longer than that is frustrating. But if there is a large IMAP operation in the background, we can't just pre-empt that and re-start it because it might have already modified some state, not all changes are idempotent. So you have to wait, and you experience slowness.

Add in message delivery, various background operations for different features, android sync, different third-party add-ons that hit via IMAP or other sync protocols, and a stack that is more than a few layers deep and it gets very complex, very fast.

Hope that helps,

-Andrew

Hi Andrew, sorry to hijack the thread. Just wanted to say you guys are doing an amazing job at full-text email searching. Do you have any paper on that? I know Google publishes research papers and technical reports but couldn't find one about that.

Any pointer would be much appreciated. Thanks!

I'm the OP. Andrew, thanks for responding here. I have a ton of connected IssuedAuthSubTokens apps, but I've most of them are just accessing my Calendar, Contacts, etc. The only one that that has access to my Gmail is Baydin (Boomerang) which, as mentioned in the post, I am writhe to remove. But I wouldn't think that one connected Gmail app would be enough to cause slowness, would it?

It all depends. I don't know how Boomerang is implemented, but it's possible that with an account your size it's hitting some degenerate condition.

One of our support folks should be emailing you and they'll help debug where the slowness lies, on our side or through some other interaction. If it's a bug, we'll fix it up shortly.

A little late to the party here, but Boomerang doesn't do anything at all except for when you Boomerang something and when it's scheduled to be sent/returned. The rest of the time, it doesn't make any API calls.

Wow. Even if this doesn't speed it up, it's scary how many connected apps I had that I'd forgotten about.

Wow, thanks for that tip. I don't even use my gmail THAT often, but removing the connected apps I don't use has basically made opening my GMail instant (it would take a few seconds on the 'loading' bar previously)

That's probably just because everything is cached now. Connected apps can't make loading slower.

I don't really understand why 3rd party apps making requests to their servers would slow down your mail.

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